This seems to be essentially what it says on the front cover, a short but intensive overview of the area covered by the medical professionals who call themselves speech therapists, speech pathologists, logopaedists, phoniatrists, orthophonists (etc.) depending on where in the world they happen to be practising, none of which names really covers the full scope of what they do. Crystal devotes the first five or six pages of the book to the evidently thorny topic of what the subject covers and what it should be called — at the time he was writing the British College of Speech Therapists had just made its second or third fruitless attempt to find a better name: I don't know if it's still such a hot potato thirty years later. But, obviously, people whose job is helping to solve other people's language problems have to be self-conscious about their own. Particularly when they are working in a field that touches on so many "sensitive" areas: child development, mental health, disability, social background...

Crystal is certainly as interested in words as you would expect: whenever he gets to an interesting new technical term in the book he pauses to gather his students around it while he takes its history and diagnoses the various incorrect ways it has been used over the years.

Otherwise, it's a rather simple book in structure, if not in content: Crystal first takes us through the theoretical clinical approaches that are relevant to language problems, then he discusses in quite some detail the physiological and psychological processes involved in producing and understanding language, and finally he looks at all the many ways things can go wrong, how those faults in the system manifest themselves and — in general terms — how they can be diagnosed. Obviously the aim is for students beginning in the field to gain an overview and learn what everything is called, and in that respect it looks as though it would be a very useful textbook. But not the 1988 edition I read, which must be far too out of date for anyone who actually needs to use this stuff. ( )